Las Gaviotas: Sustainability in the Tropics

Las Gaviotas:

Sustainability in the Tropics

In the early 1970s, facing
overwhelming obstacles, a young visionary named Paolo Lugari set out to build a
sustainable village on los llanos, the
remote plains of Colombia, some 500 kilometers east of the country's capital,
Bogotá. Lugari and a diverse and creative team of collaborators worked on the
supposition that if it could be done there, it could be done anywhere.
Supported by ingenious renewable energy technologies, hydroponic farming
techniques, and-improbably-a regenerating rainforest, Las Gaviotas has survived
and flourished for 30 years, even in the midst of Colombian internal conflict.

The son of an Italian geography
professor whose fieldwork led him to settle in southwest Colombia, Lugari first
visited the inhospitable llanos in the 1960s. Here, during the
December-to-April dry season, a merciless tropical sun bakes the savannah; the
rest of the year, severe rains inundate the landscape, making the unpaved roads
impassable for several months. In this climate, forests exist only alongside
permanent streams, which thread the savannah like tendrils creeping upland from
the massive rivers that drain the eastern slopes of the Andes into the Orinoco River
and finally the Caribbean Sea.

At a time when the OPEC oil embargo
was creating worldwide energy shortages, the restless Lugari conceived the idea
of returning to the llanos to build a sustainable village that would support
itself with renewable energy. During the first trip with his brother, Lugari
camped in an abandoned and overgrown settlement originally meant to support
construction of a road that was never built. A visit to their camp by a
yellow-billed tern (Sterna superciliaris), commonly
called gaviota (gull) by
the local people, inspired the name of the project.

Lugari assembled a team of
engineers, artists, students, natives, and even orphans from the streets of
Bogotá. Among their early products was a super-efficient turbine to generate 10
kilowatts of electricity from the flow over a small dam just one meter in
height. Later they created a double-action tail-less windmill, which can
capture energy from fleeting breezes yet has the mechanical strength to
withstand gusts in the violent thunderstorms of the rainy season. Another
effort led to a novel manual pump that can extract water from far greater
depths than conventional pumps, enabling users to reach the savannah water
table even in the dry season. In a typically creative application, Lugari's
team attached one of the pumps to a seesaw, so that kids can do useful work and
learn about their water source, while having fun at the same time. Experiments
with local soil allowed the team to create adobe pipe systems and mechanically
pressed bricks. Still other research led to the development of a solar water
distiller to obtain pure water for medical emergencies and vehicle batteries,
as well as solar-powered hot oil cookers.

Sustaining the Village

The early accomplishments of
Las Gaviotas earned support from the United Nations Development Programme,
among other international agencies. In the 1980s, the Las Gaviotas team was
hired to install their innovative "appropriate technologies" in other parts of
the country. This work included installation in many villages of water systems
based on the Gaviotas windmills and pumps. The largest single effort was a
solar hot water system for Ciudad Tunal, a 6,000-apartment public housing
project in Bogotá. The units still work perfectly, owing greatly to the fact
that they require no moving parts.

One notable project undertaken at
Las Gaviotas in the 1980s was the design and construction of a remarkable
self-sufficient rural hospital facility. Despite external temperatures that can
exceed 38 degrees Celsius, with very high humidity, the one-of-a-kind facility
provided appropriate climate control for an operating room, using bioclimatic
technologies such as subsurface tunnels and double ventilation systems on the
walls and roof. The kitchen featured solar cooking, although repeated efforts
to design an effective solar refrigerator never succeeded. Patient rooms
included louvered windows for ventilation and sliding roof panels that would
admit daylight and allow for disinfection by exposure to ultraviolet sunlight. The
hospital was enhanced by a maloca, a tall
open-sided thatch-roofed structure built by indigenous Guahibo neighbors to
provide shelter for families of patients staying close to loved ones.

Unfortunately, in the early 1990s a
new national health-care policy, modeled on the U.S. managed-care system, led
to closing of the hospital. The low population of the llanos could neither
support three permanent doctors (as the law demands) nor meet the statutory
minimum subscriber base for an independent health-care cooperative. However, in
a creative transformation facilitated by its award-winning modular design, the
sterile facility became a bottling plant for Gaviotas' Tropical Drinking Water.
Distributed free to local residents, the potable water serves public health
perhaps even more effectively than the hospital did, because medical
emergencies are rare and the clean water has helped to greatly reduce the
once-high rates of gastrointestinal disease.

As internal strife grew in Colombia
in the 1990s, Las Gaviotas remained an oasis of harmony: anyone looking for
medical care was welcome. The egalitarian social structure of the village,
where everyone's ideas and opinions contributed to community decision-making
and no one held a position of authority, made its lack of defense its most
important strength. In the end, the social and cultural value of Gaviotas
allowed it to transcend the violence.

Regenerating the Forest

From the outset, food supply
for the village was a major challenge due to the acidity of the savannah soil
and its low fertility when measured by conventional methods. Streams provided
fish, the widely scattered ranches on the isolated llanos provided beef, and
the streamside forests provided fruits, but growing staple crops in local soils
proved impossible and the village came to rely on hydroponic gardens. "These
soils are very poor, but only to poor brains," Lugari says. Part of his dream,
based on knowledge that thousands of years ago the savannah was part of the
Amazon forest, was to find a way to regenerate forest areas. This quest forms
the latest and most significant chapter in the evolution of Gaviotas.

Beginning in the 1980s, experiments
with the acidic soil of the llanos took root. When inoculated with a specific
mycorrhizal root fungus, the Caribbean pine (Pinus
caribaea), a species native to Central America, could grow in the
"poor soil" of the savannah. The consequences seemed almost miraculous. The
newly rooted seedlings provided shade, leading to lower soil temperatures and
greater moisture penetration and retention. Between the pines, other plants
started to grow and, contrary to the practice in monoculture plantations, were
allowed to flourish. All contributed to building soil. As the pines grew to
many meters, the understory supported an explosion of biodiversity, with
botanical studies reporting more than 190 different plant species. Animals have
followed the plants, and the emerging ecosystem will continue to develop as the
pines reach maturity. Because the pines are sterile in this habitat, however,
they simply serve the role of catalysts in regenerating the rainforest.

After 1990, the forest provided a
new economic base for the resilient village. The Caribbean pine produces
abundant resin, and for reasons still unknown, Gaviotas resin production is
particularly high. With use of an anticoagulant, cuts in the bark lead to resin
production for about two weeks until the tree seals itself again. The resin
trickle fills a 50-gram bag in one week, yielding more than 3 kilograms in
annual production. This process can begin when the tree is 10 years old and can
be carried on continuously for 5 years. After a few years of rest, the process
can be repeated without adverse effect on the tree.

Workers collect the small bags of
resin into larger ones and load them onto a flatbed truck on a roadway that
serves the dual purpose of forest access road and fire break. The truck
delivers to the "biofactory," a state-of-the art distillery designed by
Gaviotas engineers and powered by a steam/electrical cogeneration plant, itself
fueled by lumber harvested to thin the growing forest and maximize forest
growth. In the factory, the tacky resin is liquefied, while the bags are
recycled. After filtration and sedimentation, the mix goes through a
distillation process that yields turpentine and a residue known as colophony or
rosin. The liquid turpentine is drawn off the top into steel drums. In a
remarkable prize-winning innovation, the Gaviotas team designed a
triple-layered cardboard container to receive hot rosin. Upon cooling, the
rosin cools and solidifies in 25-kilogram blocks, providing an easy medium for
shipping and simple extraction by the end user. No part of the distillation
process requires additional chemicals.

Both turpentine and rosin are
valuable sales products. Turpentine finds universal use as an organic solvent
and disinfectant; it also is used in the production of fragrances. Rosin is a
component of products as diverse as glossy papers, paints, and cosmetics, as
well as the gripping agent used for violin strings and baseball bats. The
domestic Gaviotas rosin production helps to displace costly imports. In
addition to these products, the Las Gaviotas arbochemistry program plans more
sophisticated biorefining to yield 12 other products, including oils and
fragrances.

The initial achievement of viable
forest growth led to a massive tree-planting effort. During the three-month
planting season, an imported American tractor-now fueled by raw palm oil,
eliminating the need to import diesel fuel-pulls a Gaviotas-designed
double-rowed planter. This machine makes it possible to transplant 30 nursery
seedlings per minute, 24 hours every day except Sundays. Since the initial
planting in the early 1980s, the forest has grown to 8,000 hectares.

Besides generating resin products,
the forest yielded a serendipitous bonus: systematically cooler temperatures
over the forested land have caused a local increase in rainfall. Moreover, the
increasingly rich biomass in the soil provides more effective filtering. Wells under
the forest now yield drinking water of the highest purity, which is bottled
along with tropical fruit juices in the sterile facilities of the converted
hospital. Thus, the forest provides an enhanced supply of safe drinking water
as well as additional sale products to support the village. With characteristic
creativity, the Gaviotas team has designed plastic bottles for reuse as
interlocking toys.

Expanding Social Sustainability

Las Gaviotas is managed to
provide employment for as many people as come to work. The village now supports
some 200 laborers, who earn daily wages on a task-based scheme that pays at
least double the national minimum wage (which is about $200 a month), in
addition to room, board, and medical care. Among the workers are a large percentage
of long-time residents-we met gray-haired Pompilio Arciniegas, who recalls
planting the very first tree more than 20 years ago, and Henry Moya, whom
author Alan Weisman described as an 11-year old in the 1970s-joined by young
men from outside the village attracted by the idea of earning an income that
would help them legitimately satisfy the needs of their families. Other workers
come eagerly to a place where they do not have to live in fear of the civil
unrest. Aside from the direct jobs provided, more than 3,000 people receive
indirect benefits from Gaviotas.

The village itself has about 50
resident families, totaling about 200 people. Over the years, some 30 children
have been born in the village and some 500 children from the village and from the
surrounding region have attended the Gaviotas school. Adult residents rotate
among the various jobs in the village, from construction to planting to
gardening to cooking. Among other benefits, this equips everyone to contribute
creatively to improving productivity and to overall satisfaction. Four
residents are on pension after working for 25 years.

The success of Las Gaviotas in
sustainably supporting the community from the products of the regenerated
rainforest has prompted new dreams of expanding the forest across the savannah,
with both environmental and social benefits. A map on the factory wall shows
the regions of Vichada province that have sufficient drainage and appropriate
mineralogy. The total comes to 3 million hectares, nearly 400 times the present
size of Las Gaviotas, without consideration of additional land in neighboring
Meta province. Carbon sequestration by the growing forest is estimated at 18
tons per hectare, so that the forest will sequester about 50 million tons of
carbon per year during its 50-year growth cycle, offsetting roughly one-quarter
of Colombia's entire projected contribution of global greenhouse gas emissions
during this time.

The expansion of a
Gaviotas-inspired biodiversity project to such a scale would employ tens of
thousands of workers and support hundreds of thousands of people. Lugari's
enlarged dream conceives these people living in scores of economically,
socially, and environmentally sustainable villages in productive harmony with
nature. Achieving this would change the living conditions of a great part of
the Colombian people and transform the world's view of the country.

Plans to achieve this extraordinary
environmental and social transformation, beginning with a tenfold expansion of
the forest around Las Gaviotas, won endorsement from President Alvaro Uribe in
2004. Moreover, to support the project, the Colombian Air Force has offered a
site for the initial replication of the Gaviotas initiative. The name of the
place is Marandúa, which in the local dialect means "bearer of good news." The
land encompasses about three-quarters of a military reserve that occupies over
70,000 hectares, about 100 kilometers from the Orinoco River in eastern
Vichada. This Air Force commitment to sustainable development as a path to
peace is unprecedented in the history of any Latin American military.

Partnership with ZERI

An important partner and
promoter of the Marandúa reforestation project is Zero Emissions Research and
Initiatives (ZERI), led by Belgian entrepreneur Gunter Pauli, one-time CEO of
the ecological home products manufacturer Ecover. Pauli founded ZERI in 1994,
following the realization that even his biodegradable products depended on a
system of production that was unsustainable. Under his leadership, ZERI propagates
the "uncompromising, but self-evident" sustainability standard of zero waste,
fosters research needed to bring it to reality, and implements systems
conceived to build value by taking residues from one enterprise as raw
materials for others, rendering the very concept of "waste" anachronistic. ZERI
has generated projects on five continents. They include the Montfort Boys Town
in Fiji (see World Watch,
July/August 1997).

Pauli initially met Paolo Lugari in
1984, when Pauli visited Colombia with his mentor Aurelio Peccei, founder of
the Club of Rome (which is best known for commissioning the groundbreaking 1972
study Limits to Growth).
Recognizing in Las Gaviotas a living example of the principles he espouses,
Pauli has become its most vocal champion as a world model of sustainable
development. ZERI has supported the efforts of Las Gaviotas by generating close
to $100,000 in private donations. It has also assisted the Marandúa project by
searching for international investors under the standard of "corporate social
responsibility," as well as by implementing innovative funding mechanisms.

One such mechanism couples two
components of the reforestation system: carbon sequestration and the production
of pure water. In the face of growing demand for both products, Las Gaviotas is
seeking longterm contracts to provide drinking water, providing incentives for
institutional buyers to secure carbon sequestration certification under the
Kyoto Protocol. Such contracts would offset the buyers' carbon emissions (and
those resulting from overseas transport of the water) by financing the planting
of new, biodiverse forests.

The second mechanism for financing
the reforestation effort is ecotourism. Colombia is a nation of extraordinary
biodiversity, owing to its location in the tropics and its range of habitats,
from coasts on the Caribbean and the Pacific, to the three spines of the Andes
that divide the country with peaks as high as 5,800 meters above sea level, to
the vast plains and rainforests of the eastern provinces. Among the attractions
of the eastern savannah is the pristine Tuparro National Park, which lies just
across the Río Tomo from Marandúa. Although the domestic violence that has
plagued Colombia has limited tourism and ecological research, the potential for
future development is enormous.

In the spring of 2005, after almost
10 years during which the conflict prevented the visit of any outsiders,
foreigners and Colombians alike, the authors had the privilege of visiting Las
Gaviotas and Marandúa with tours led by Gunter Pauli. The timing of the first
visit, in May, was dictated by the filming of a documentary by Fuji TV that
would be broadcast in early June during a state visit by Colombian President
Uribe to Japan.

Through efforts such as water
sales, international site visits, and high-level diplomacy, the Marandúa
project is becoming a reality. This growing fruit represents the organic
development of the dreams and efforts of many people: Paolo Lugari himself, the
Colombian government, the Air Force commander-in-chief and his deputies, a
Belgian entrepreneur who believes in Colombia, and many others who trust in the
great potential offered by the richness and biodiversity of the country. The
ultimate dream is that the reforested savannah will become home to hundreds of
thousands of people who will be able to live in peace and contribute with their
work to generating wealth in one of the cleanest environments in the world.

Spanning one wall of the community
center in Gaviotas is a colorful mural painted by a local artist who signs his
work only with his ID number. The mural portrays the past, present, and future
of Las Gaviotas, along with the artist's dreams: residents and their children
at work and at play, making music and dancing amid a rich company of indigenous
wildlife. In the center of the mural is a sign: "Maturity consists of making
dreams come true." Paolo Lugari is fond of saying: "If you aren't dreaming, you
must be asleep!" The waking dream of Lugari and his fellow Colombians shines as
a beacon of hope in a troubled world.

Richard
E. White is professor emeritus of
astronomy at Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts, and chair of the
Sustainability Alliance of Southwest Colorado in Durango, Colorado. Gloria
Eugenia González Mariño is associate professor
and research and development director in the College of Engineering,
Universidad de la Sabana, Chía, Cundinamarca, Colombia.